rovi

Rovi is announcing the acquisition of video discovery startup Fan TV today. The deal will add to Rovi’s portfolio of cloud-based guide offerings for service providers, while also giving it some consumer-facing apps. And for Fan TV, the acquisition could help bring its streaming set-top box to more consumers. Read More

Rovi has announced that it will soon add advanced voice search to its portfolio of tricks, through the acquisition of video discovery startup Veveo. Rovi will pay $62 million in cash for the company and its IP at closing, and up to $7 million in additional payments based on certain performance milestones. Read More

Facebook’s on a mission to make mobile Pages more functional. Following a Yelp-ish redesign in April, iOS, Android, and mobile site updates coming later today add an integration with OpenTable to let you book reservations from 20,000 North American restaurants’ Facebook Pages, Rovi is also adding TV guides to Pages. Facebook is looking to grow traffic and make Pages more important… Read More

One thing Rovi Product Management Director Charles Dawes is excited about is the ratification of H.265 or the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) format, which will provide higher-quality video streams over the Internet while using less bandwidth. After the standard gets ratified, you can expect content owners to start pushing even high-quality video files. Read More

One of the main surprises of Google’s Fiber announcement in Kansas City last week was that the company also plans to provide its own TV service to the residents of its ‘fiberhoods.’ There are some issues with Google’s Fiber TV service, including the fact that it seems to be missing quite a bit of content, but it’s definitely looking to be a very competitive offering. Read More

It looks like Sears wants to get in the online movie market. The retail company, which also owns Kmart, has just announced that it is launching a Netflix-like movie download service, called Alphaline Entertainment.
Powered by Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow platform (Rovi just bought Sonic Solutions for $720 million), Alphaline allows Sears and Kmart customers to download movies and and TV… Read More

I’ve never used a Tivo, but I hear good things, especially with respect to its on-screen guide. I have subscribed to Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, and I can tell you that their on-screen guides are basic at best, junk at worst. There’s more than 1,000 channels, and the best you can do is break that into “Sports” and “Entertainment and Music”? Gee, thanks. Read More